THE CRYSTAL ; A RECORD OF 1665. 541 



Dr Hen wick shook his head, and said, feelingly, " that so far as I 

 had een any thing unpleasant, he wished to hope the same." 



We returned to the Pied Bull, and there, leaving the Doctor to 

 make what arrangements and orders he pleased for the feast of the 

 nsuing Friday, I mounted my horse and rode slowly home. 



From that time the scenes of the Crystal were never absent from 

 my mind ; no, not even in sleep in which dreams brought theni 

 again before me with circumstances of aggravated horror. I had no 

 peace ; and I felt that I never should have any, till the lapse of the 

 fatal year should prove the images of the Crystal illusive. This, in 

 my secret mind, I hardly hoped, though I sometimes fancied that I 

 had laughed and mocked my heart out of its fears ; but the evidence 

 of the truth of these images was so strong, and circumstances were 

 so often arising to confirm them, that in any abiding incredulity the 

 mind could not possibly settle down. But the keen achings of the 

 heart were all within. No eye saw them. I became more gay, more 

 noisy, more boisterously dissipated than ever ; for I sought in variety 

 of active enjoyment to drown for a time the memory of the things I 

 had seen, and the prospect of the things I feared. I dreaded the 

 lapse of time ; yet I sought to accelerate its march, because I 

 thought the presence of evil less terrible than its anxious and feverish 

 expectation, and because perhaps I had a glimmering hope that, 

 however true in other things, the Crystal had untruly prophesied in 

 the things I dreaded. 



Oh, with what feelings did I meet my dear Margaret on her 

 return, and consort with her after. I never viewed her slim and 

 graceful form I never looked upon her happy and smiling coun- 

 tenance I never beheld her with that peculiarly graceful motion of 

 her head toss back the bright ringlets of her silken hair, I never 

 saw all this ; but that form, as exposed to view in open day, and 

 dragged carelessly through the street?, recumbent on a heap of death 

 and plague that sweet countenance ghastly, silent, and unheeding 

 and that most lovely hair dishevelled, and spread wildly and wide 

 around on other faces in the cart, was ever present to me, frenzied all 

 my feelings, and drove me for relief to the stupefactions of wine, 

 and the excitements of play. Often, often did I bitterly curse the 

 hour when vain curiosity and idle bravo brought all this misery upon 

 me. If the Crystal had indeed truly represented the things which 

 must be, still for fourteen months 1 might have been happy in my 

 ignorance of approaching evil, and have gone on hoping to the last ; 

 still all these agonies and fears, which far exceed all I can imagine of 

 hell, might have been spared me, and my pathway to the grave to 

 hers to mine, might have been pregnant with delights, and strewed 

 with all the flowers which grow only in that garden which love hath 

 planted. 



Meanwhile, as time went on, not hastened by my impatience or 

 retarded by my fears, circumstances arose one after another, till now, 

 to tell me that the Crystal had not lied; and now, my brother, only 

 one thing the last the least remains to be accomplished. 



First, then ; one evening my dear Margaret was singing to her 

 lute a song, which I had myself written and set to music. When 



